[CentOS] Need to test serial port connection

Fri Feb 27 16:40:40 UTC 2009
John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com>

fred smith wrote:
> And some of t hose boards have a set of pins/header on the board and a little
> "slot fillter" thingy with a 9 pin serial socket on it and a small ribbon cable 
> to plug into that header, which will then provide access to the second serial
> port. I've seen a lot of ASUS boards like that. wouldn't surpirse me if other
> vendors to it, too. probably saves board design complexity and maybe a few
> hundredths of a penny per board. :)
>   

and, many of the -newest- boards have no serial (or parallel) at all, 
not even a header.  COM ports are a legacy ISA device, and they are 
removing the ISA stub entirely (the other remaining use of which was the 
floppy controller, which also is left off these newest boards).    when 
you get rid of this stuff, you get rid of the ancient 8257 ISA DMA 
controller emulation.

my newest PC build, I needed serial for a weather station, an older cell 
phone, and a older GPS...  so rather than mess with USB serial dongles, 
I got a $17 4 port PCI-E serial controller, which actually looksl ike 
16550 UARTs to the host.   works great.   was branded Sabrent, I think, 
that or Syba.